Site upgrade coming; make sure your email address is up-to-date

The Oil Drum is upgrading to a more sophisticated content management system later this month. We are working to ensure a smooth transition between the current site and the new site—site will look mostly the same, all of the old links will work, and all of the user accounts will be brought over.

The exception is the passwords, which are NOT being moved over. When the new site goes live, you will give it your username and it will email you instructions on how to set your password. This will only work if we have an up-to-date email address for you. If you have an outdated or invalid email address, you will NOT receive the instructions.

Please follow this link (while logged into the site) and make sure your email address is correct. If it's not, please update it. Thank you.

[Editor's note, by Prof. Goose] And, consider this an open thread after you have checked your email prefs...
From The Housing Bubble Blog:

The Modesto Bee. "A Salida (California) couple is suing a group that offers real estate deals at a Ceres flea market, claiming that the company didn't deliver on promises to sell their home and get them a better one."

"Instead, say Manuel and Marbella Salas, they have a new house with construction defects, haven't sold their old home and have learned that the man who arranged the deals doesn't have a real estate license."

"`I want people to know what they're doing,' Marbella Salas said. `We had good credit, and now we're getting notices from the electric company.'"

"The couple's mortgage payment was $2,200 a month; they bring home about $6,600 per month. VJ Singh followed up with phone calls saying he could help them sell or rent their home and buy a bigger one elsewhere, and only increase their mortgage payment by $200 a month, the couple said."

"After they agreed to buy another house in Salida in December 2005 for about $500,000, they learned that the new mortgage would be $4,200 a month."

"Marbella Salas said she's afraid that others are getting questionable real estate deals with Singh and the company, adding that he still was set up at the flea market as recently as a few weeks ago. `He didn't care about us,' she said. `He only cared about his commission.'"

Forclosures have doubled here in Atlanta in the past year.
Georgia foreclosures jump 99%, rate is nation's 3rd highest

    This in a city whose economy owes a rather large part of its existence to suburban and exurban ex p  a   n    s       i       o           n... that and tourism and trade shows, which are themselves vulnerable - not exactly much of the P in "E.L.P.".

Shipping container homes are looking more and more like one of those "just crazy enough to work" ideas...    

They would actually be very energy-efficent if buried to take advantage of the earth's natural heating/cooling effect
I've seen them used a lot in the oil patch for storage, as well as at a lot of companies for temporary storage. Hope your wife isn't into fashion and elegance.
Funny you should mention... it was her idea. The containers themselves are dirt cheap right now though, leaving plenty of money for renovation to make it look like a "real" house. Plus, if designed right, they're relatively immune to all types of natural disaster (including the straight-from-the-pages-of-the-worst-doomer-porn zombie hordes.)  
http://www.prosefights.org/coal/coal.htm#tina and http://www.realestatedecline.com/
I've noticed a subtle change in the way the "[new]" tag works that indicates new comments. After making a post, I usually skip back to the last page I was viewing before hitting the "post a comment" button. This used to preserve all the "[new]" tags so that I could easily scan the rest of the thread for new messages. Sometime in the last few days, however, this behavior has changed. Now when I skip back to the last page before starting my post, it appears to reload the page, and in the process blows away all the "[new]" tags.

Is this a change to the way the web site works, is it a problem with my browser?

Good point Calorie,

I've also had to figure out ways not to lose the new comment vs. previous comment tags when posting...

Use a tabbed browser (IE7, Firefox, Opera, Safari).

Middle click on the post button, this will open a new tab with the post page. Write you message, post it and close the tab. The original page with all your new tags will remain unchanged.

That should say, middle click on the reply to this link not post button.
Thanks, I've used that method in the past and it looks like I will have to use it again.

It's not just a problem with posting, BTW. It appears that if you do anything that either goes to a different part of the page (i.e. clicking on the "Parent" link) or brings up a new page (i.e. "Reply to This," "Post a Coment," etc.), then try to skip back to the page you were reading using the back button on your browser (usually Alt-Left Arrow, but you can also skip back multiple pages via the drop-down back menu), then you lose all your "[new]" tags. I think somewhere along the line the page is being forced to reload, which blows away the old "[new]" tags and brings in the next set.

This is a recent change in behavior, and I can't figure out whether it's in my browser (Mozilla Firefox 2.0) or a recent change in the Oil Drum web site.

I think it's your browser, because "back" still works for me (in Firefox 2 and 1.5).  

You might trying emptying your cache and/or increasing its size.

what are the changes?
please no user voting on other's comments or any other means giving users the ability to hide other people's posts from anyone other then themselves.
It would help if the posts were moderated to some extent, so extremely off-topic and offensive posts could be removed.
It would help if the posts were moderated to some extent, so extremely off-topic and offensive posts could be removed.

Agreed.

The weird spam messages and the posts made by a certain drunk or dopehead are a bit tedious.

Though I myself clash with "a certain drunk or dopehead" or the trolls in residence I strongly oppose any censorship.
As TrueKaiser suggest the ability to hide other people's posts ONLY from your own view should be enough.